Thea Astley - Inventing Her Own Weather

by Karen Lamb

  One woman in these stories does fare well but critics could have been forgiven for not noticing the self-portrait in the character Mrs Waterman in ‘Petals from Blown Roses’. Fifteen years later Astley had certainly not forgotten her. When she stepped onto the stage for a small reading at Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar in Carlton, Melbourne, in 1993 she gave the impression of re-enacting an old friendship: ‘We need to catch up with Mrs Waterman. I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for her. She is a straight talker. And …’ (Astley was whispering) ‘… she has tits.’ The audience laughed, seeing that Astley was similarly endowed. She continued, ‘Tits are important. No, I mean it! Look, I’ll tell you … how I came to write Mrs Waterman … it was up north, terribly modern with loud music and lots to drink and everyone got their gear off and swam in the pool – well, it WAS hot, I suppose … and look I was amazed … Aw God, how can I put this without sounding … at women who were, well, lacking in any mammary development. Well, this one woman – who hadn’t been joining in – decided to have a go. All eyes were riveted as she undressed slowly (I think she was sober) and someone yells out, a man of course, “Look, she’s got real ones!” It was one of those moments.’16

  Mrs Waterman is a ‘yummy forty-five’, ten years younger than Astley when she wrote the story. When talking about herself growing older, Astley often said, ‘Look, for a long time I was arrested at forty-two.’17 This was the age she had been when she still enjoyed teaching at Macquarie and Don Whitington was on the scene. Mrs Waterman exudes sense, sensuality and, above all, control. For once Astley was describing sex in terms of sensuality, not a power struggle.

  It had been over three years since Don’s death in 1977, but closer to ten since they had finally parted back in 1970. Just a few years after Don’s permanent move to Canberra, news filtered through of Don’s remarriage to a woman nearly thirty years his junior, which could only have fed Astley’s fatalism about romance: men did that, didn’t they? She didn’t attend his funeral. Astley was well on the way to developing her theory of the four ages of women: ‘bimbo, breeder, baby-sitter, burden’.18

  Astley still tended to interpret heterosexual relationships as intrinsically degrading to women, while accepting them as the norm. But as she grew older she began to adjust her own memory. Whereas in the mid-1960s she had pronounced women to be ‘sad things’ as they age, she was now thinking about herself ageing, about those strong women who were eccentric in their independence (cowboy-attired Aunt Sadie in The Acolyte, for instance) but who were still very much female. Her story ‘Ladies Need Only Apply’ in the 1979 Pineapple story collection attracted a lot of comment from colleagues who had read it because of what was seen as its excruciating portrait of a woman at the mercy of her own sexual needs. Fay Zwicky’s view was: ‘It was Thea questioning herself, I think – was she a lady?’19

  She was interested in women who still desired men. ‘What do you do for sex?’ is a very Thea Astley kind of question. Marie, in Boat Load, downed sex like gin and tonic; opera-singing Gracie Tilburn in A Kindness Cup was highly sexual, but Astley was not comfortable with granting her characters sexual licence without humiliation. It was vulnerability that mattered and that was asexual; she had explored this in her first published story, ‘Cubby’, about a young boy’s sexual awakening.

  Astley chose to write in a female first-person perspective for her next novel, An Item from the Late News. It had been over twenty years since she had done so. She rearranged her characters in notes, carefully numbering incidents in a tight logical track – she knew exactly how tragically the scenes would play out. If Mrs Waterman was an idealised self-portrait, then Gabby Jerrold, the protagonist in Item, was an antithetically dark self-portrait.

  While UQP wrestled with editing and managing the forthcoming An Item from the Late News, Astley was strongly connected to Penguin about the future of paperback editions of earlier titles, including Hunting the Wild Pineapple, with others to follow. Astley had been a ‘gloom bug’, she knew, when she had met her Penguin publisher Brian Johns in Brisbane, even though it was great that he wanted to republish her earlier books.20

  There had been the usual request for a photo, too, which Astley considered a punishment, as it was forcing her to watch herself ageing. With classic deflection she described the enlargements that had just arrived from Townsville: ‘They are nicely vague. And I prefer the one with my eyes cast down. I wasn’t asleep. I was just lying on the grass at a beach home at Yorkey’s Knob, examining a Barringtonia nut.’21

  Astley’s ‘gloom bug’ effect shows how sensitive she was in this immediate post-Macquarie period. Her demeanour could be a bit wearing, even for good friends like her colleague John Bernard. He and his wife, Judith, were among those whom Astley invited to join her at the little settlement at Mantaka, near Kuranda, with its set of half-a-dozen European houses and Aboriginal shanties. Astley had already regaled them with stories of the Aboriginal children who swam among the freshwater crocodiles.

  When there had been ‘unkind reaction’ to Astley’s representation of Aboriginal people in the Pineapple collection, it was Bernard who best understood Astley’s hurt. He had seen himself the genuineness of her response to those Aboriginal children, though he knew that was not necessarily the same as writing about them with sympathy and compassion. He suggested Astley’s particular style for that subject made for unstable sympathies. He was tiptoeing around her vulnerabilities about her wordy ‘style’ that went back decades, but he did not succeed. ‘Well, I suppose we don’t have to be friends,’ snapped Astley. There were no further visits to the Bernards in Sydney.22

  Astley had felt wounded leaving Macquarie, let down by Nelson, and was now miserable in Aarhus, Denmark, where she was a writer-in-residence. Astley had agreed to visit the Commonwealth Literature Centre at Aarhus University in the early months of 1981. She was one of many Australian authors that the centre’s director, Australian-born Anna Rutherford, had encouraged to visit. The conditions here for writing – forced if pleasant company by day and behind closed doors at night – mirrored exactly her early years as a teacher in small Queensland towns. She seemed to have come such a long way, as a renowned international guest-writer, yet in a way she had come nowhere at all. She was still imagining her characters’ worst psychic distress in the tropics ‘writing out the things that bothered her’: in this novel, Gabby, a visual artist (‘I’ve been painting the heart of boredom’), is recovering from a serious depression. She is a woman hiding from herself; one whose birth-given secondary role of ‘female’ breeds a gap between who she is and who she feels she has to be. All the while she practises the ‘protective veneers of womanhood’.23

  Gabby is covert in her relationships with others, surviving by keeping her feelings in that ‘inner country’, her ‘screwed-up rag of a self’. ‘There is no talent in me, but I do have a flair,’ says Gabby.24 She expresses herself in the nervy self-talk so familiar in Astley’s earlier protagonists, a ‘chronicle of self-appraisal and self-doubt’.25 Gabby is the ultimate extension of Astley’s original portraits of self-regarding young women caught up in small town hostilities, a character to showcase the author’s unassuageable discontent. Astley wrote to her editor at UQP, D’Arcy Randall, obviously closely identifying with her character: ‘[Gabby’s] just this poor old failure of a dame writing it and writing it and writing …’26 The female first-person narrator Gabby is a bridging character to the women of Astley’s later fiction. She couldn’t know it, but she was already influencing women writers of the day, including Kate Grenville. As Randall later commented, women writers were joining UQP’s list on the strength of Astley’s work.27

  The year 1982 began well. Astley received her $2,000 advance for An Item from the Late News. This, in addition to the twenty per cent royalty rate, meant that her contract with UQP was the most generous she had signed. A residency at the University of Queensland could only bolster the relationship. The ABC was developing a telemovie based on A Des
cant for Gossips, the 1960s film prospect having vanished long before. Best of all, Penguin were likely to put more of her books into paperback; she had been thrilled with their cover for Hunting the Wild Pineapple. She had sent Penguin publisher Brian Johns a copy of A Boat Load of Home Folk.

  The contracting of Item to the rival UQP meant she could expect his final decision to be influenced by that – and perhaps slow in coming. However, 1982 proved to be a year of small but satisfying machinations of a commercial literary kind. Astley now had the time, the energy and the inclination to chase down all her publishers and ask for the royalties due to her.28 Nelson did not reply quickly to her letters requesting information on payment of royalties – perhaps there was nothing sinister in that – but Astley thought that managing editor Bob Sessions was being less than co-operative because she had sold her most recent novel to the University of Queensland Press.29

  Kuranda was a fortress from which to sling all manner of arrows and make decisions about allegiances without necessarily being able to see the consequences for those on the receiving end. There were many visitors – from the Macquarie years, other writers, Ed and his friends – and the combination of the silence necessary for writing with well-planned episodes of conviviality afforded Astley the perfect double life of the writer.

  Beatrice Davis had been one of the first to take the trip up north and arrived to hear Astley complaining about badly edited and mistake-ridden proofs. Which proofs? Davis knew of none. She realised for the first time that her favourite author had changed publishers. Thus it was that Bob Sessions at Nelson heard of Astley’s defection, and he wrote to her expressing regret at losing her from their list. Astley rallied to her own defence by citing UQP’s enticing substantial advance before seeing the manuscript; with characteristic understatement Davis wrote to Sessions, ‘I take it she missed me as consultant in writing and editing.’30 Typically playing both sides, Astley was complaining about UQP and the proofs while telling Davis how much she missed her. Knowing that she had introduced UQP’s Frank Thompson to Astley’s work with Girl with a Monkey back in 1958 must have been even more galling for Davis.31 It was a sad end to their long creative association, but the two women remained friendly. Within a year, Davis retired from Nelson.

  Emboldened by the interest of several publishers in her work, Astley became mischievous in some of her dealings. She pretended mystification when it came to the payment of royalties, sometimes suggesting easier and more direct methods that would get the money to her – fiddly and unorthodox practices from a trade perspective.32 Astley’s particular combination of assertiveness, financial savvy and professed naivety persisted in other financial dealings too. She hoped that using her married name of Gregson might confuse the tax office; she paid and then reclaimed lump sum deposits on blocks of land, beach shacks, taken on and abandoned sometimes within the space of a week. Subject to multiple changes of heart, Astley astonished real estate agents. Sometimes she simply forfeited the deposit. Ed was frequently called in for a second opinion.

  Thea: ‘Whadya think?’

  Ed: ‘Nice location, great little house.’

  Thea: ‘Do you really think so?’

  Ed: ‘Yes. You do realise what that is?’

  Thea: ‘What?’

  Ed: ‘The boat ramp.’

  Thea: ‘So?’

  Ed: ‘A speedboat ramp.’

  Thea: ‘Oh, Gawd!’

  Back to the agent.

  Astley might have known to the last cent what her publishers owed her but in these matters she was almost completely reactive. She was already starting to think that her first Penguin edition was her best publishing moment but while she corresponded with Penguin regularly about Boat Load – ‘I think I would prefer the date of my birth to be omitted from the jacket’33 – it was the reception of An Item from the Late News that was preoccupying her and, as always, the writing of her next novel.

  Astley made sure to send a copy of Item to Beatrice, the person whose opinion had guided her writing for more than forty years. Beatrice replied:

  I shall treasure it of course, but what a terrible story – so powerfully told that the devastating tragedy made me feel truly sick. Greed plus brutality, with Gabby the informed onlooker. I couldn’t believe in her, though unhappy and frustrated in her love, behaving with such bitter spirit. Yet this is the basis of your sad tale. Can’t say more at the moment, being too close to this horrible small town world you’ve conjured up, too close even to snipe at you for being at times too clever by half. Congratulations and love, Beatrice.34

  Did Davis really think that this was a nasty book written by an unhappy writer? Perhaps Astley had offended the doyenne of literary publishing by her defection.

  Ed, now twenty-five, had met someone two years before and the relationship looked serious. He and Michelle Barbour did everything together, or so it seemed. It was hard to know what to make of her, a beautician – ‘for heaven’s sake, a beautician,’ Astley took to telling people loudly, as if the word attracted its own damnation.35 Under the cheap jokes was something deeper: anxiety about the inevitable changes Astley foresaw in her own relationship with her son. Michelle was a serious and tough-minded young woman who did not melt meekly in the face of Astley’s histrionic one-liners nor the quieter tactics of irony. Michelle had laughed knowingly when a previous girlfriend of Ed’s had leaned towards her and whispered emphatically, ‘What about that mother!’36

  When Jack and Thea met Michelle’s recently divorced mother, June, many things fell into place. June was living the kind of independent life Astley admired in women who had managed to extricate themselves from marriage. Thea, Jack and June got on well. June, like Jack, was happy with a scotch and somehow able to survive Thea’s chain-smoking – and June loved to read. She knew, appreciated and respected Astley as a writer. The family get-togethers became easy, open and relaxed in ways that Astley had never enjoyed in her own family life.

  June quickly became a firm friend to Thea and Jack and a support to Ed and Michelle. She enjoyed a very close relationship with her own children, which Thea looked upon almost in awe. June was amused one day to hear Thea coming down the stairs, announcing to all, ‘Michelle. I can hear you and you’re talking to your mother as if she’s the Queen.’ In private with June she would sometimes ask, ‘Why don’t Ed and Michelle treat me the way they treat you? Why don’t they love me like that?’ June could see why: Thea was Thea. She was different, that was all. And all children, as well as parents, had their particular ways of showing love.37

  If anyone understood this it was Ed himself. After leaving school he had spent some years trying to sort out the mixed messages from his parents about his life. There seemed on the one hand to be a total and passionate commitment to his choice of a career in music performance, but then there were the regular little worried speeches about the importance of having ‘something to fall back on’. His confidence was being undermined and by the time he met Michelle he had begun to distance himself from his parents’ advice. Michelle helped him to understand their views while continuing to maintain a close relationship with them.

  It was an important development, since Ed was their closest relative. Jack saw little of his own wider family. His father and brothers were all still alive and living in New South Wales. Thea had visits from Phil when they both happened to be in Sydney several times a year. The merging of family groups through Ed and Michelle, now living in the Epping house, unexpectedly created a new family for all.

  Time was bringing all sorts of natural life changes but many of the things that seriously bothered Astley in the past still clung to her. Vanuatu in July had been hard work. Astley had been researching the background for her novel Beachmasters in which the original inhabitants of the island colony of Kristi stage a brief rebellion. She was writing the new novel, thanks partly to a residency at her old university in Brisbane. It was now 1983 and she had been writing for forty yea
rs.

  She was unable to shake her animosity towards the entire commercial machinery of the book trade, despite Penguin’s publishing the paperback of An Item from the Late News and UQP’s acceptance of A Descant for Gossips for their own paperback list. Mixing with other writers led to odious comparisons, with Astley finding out what publishers were doing for them and by implication what they weren’t doing for her. David Malouf had talked of the ‘dozens of interviews’ Penguin had organised for him. It rankled Astley. She wrote to Julie Watts, her editor at Penguin:

  I was rather hurt when Penguin gave no publicity at all for Pineapple. For Boatload [sic] I rated one radio interview with the ABC in Tasmania at a breakfast talks session. When I suggested to the Penguin girl ringing me – can’t remember her name – that at least an interview with Brisbane or Cairns might be more apposite, she replied that the ABC were very choosy. Now, frankly, I found that pretty hurtful. Really, I’m not writing Mills and Boon. I think I have a fair track record.38

  She was ‘sad and bitter’. To others her wounds always came across as emotional and complicated by resentment and ambition.Her strongest complaint about the Australian response to her books was its failure to look at her oeuvre as a whole. As she later commented to Rodney Hall, ‘Why don’t they just take a look? Why don’t they just say, let’s look at her – she’s written all these books, some good, some not so good – but what do they add up to?’39

  In reality, Astley was faring reasonably well in terms of academic recognition, and she knew it. Journal articles had been appearing for some years – in Meanjin, The Southern Review and Kunapipi – and five years earlier, Astley had asked Beatrice Davis if the author of one such article could review the Pineapple collection.40 But the Australian literary world was small and Astley craved the broad engagement with books that she saw in the American mainstream press. She had always felt that ‘the standard of competence in writing since the war’ lay in America and ‘not in England at all’.41 Some on the Literature Board had misgivings about the expense involved in promoting Australian writers overseas, but Astley was not one of them.